With the rapid development of wireless broadband Internet access services, wireless home gateway products develop rapidly. However, a physical layout of high-power wireless local area network, Wireless Local Area Network, WLAN, devices has certain limitations and a penetration capability of WIFI, wireless fidelity, signals is weak, which result in that there are certain blind areas in WIFI signal coverage, and therefore, development opportunities are brought to a WLAN signal repeating device WLAN Repeater. A WLAN Repeater includes a WLAN access point side, Access Point, AP, and a WLAN client side Client, where the WLAN AP side of the WLAN Repeater may receive access of a station, Station, STA, device, and the WLAN Client side may be used an STA to connect to another AP, which is as a good extension of WIFI signals, to effectively solve a coverage problem of the WIFI signals. Currently, for a WLAN Repeater product on the market, when data transmission is performed by a downstream interface, a WLAN AP interface, and an upstream interface, a WLAN Client interface, a wireless STA MAC address attached to a WLAN AP side is replaced with a MAC address of a WLAN Client side of the Repeater itself. Therefore, an existing Repeater product is not a WIFI signal repeater in a real sense.
However, in a scenario of WLAN coverage based on MAC address authentication/accounting, for example, in a scenario of enterprise-level WLAN, AP/AC, coverage based on AAA authentication and accounting or portal authentication, if the existing WLAN Repeater is adopted, an accounting party or an authentication party can perform accounting for an address of a WLAN Client of the WLAN Repeater only, and cannot perform accounting for an STA MAC address of each attached STA separately. Therefore, the existing WLAN Repeater cannot meet a requirement of unified authentication/accounting based on a MAC address.